friday, six august: the hierophant
Continuing what still feels like a statistically-improbable run of major arcana cards, today’s card is The Hierophant.
One way to read it: the picture is a black bird sitting on a key, and we’re going back to the lake with my parents today, where my mother routinely feels menaced by a large black bird. I mean, there is a large black bird there, she’s not imagining it. It hops around on the picnic tables and occasionally raids unattended food. We saw it steal chips out of a totebag once. What my mother is projecting on to the bird is the personal nature of its interest; she sees it as a malign presence when really it’s just, like, a bird looking for food.
Large birds aside, the posted meaning of the card has to do with a teacher or a mentor, hitting a place in your life where you need outside guidance or additional support. Again, there are a number of ways this could be relevant to my life right now. One comes to mind: I’m working through some scheduling logistics with the major paper I want to assign in my elective class next year, and I reached out last week to several colleagues, all of whom were incredibly gracious in offering to find time during summer break to talk the problem through with me. And then I completely dropped the ball on following through with any of them. That is sort of the stage of summer break that I’m in right now, the stage where I’m actively thinking about course prep but unable to follow through. This is also the part of the summer where I start to feel the “oh, all these things we didn’t get a chance to do” pressure. It’s fine. We’re having a good summer, there’s more summer still ahead, and things don’t have to be perfect anyway.